Echo Lake: A Novel (27 page)

Connie would not be innocent. She wouldn’t be caught in a place like Heartshorne again. Because she was from there, a daughter of Heartshorne, it was right that she had been punished. But no place would own her now.

She was completely free.

21

Emily emerged from Colleen’s trailer into the heat, the change so sudden and unexpected that she gulped the air and was afraid that she might not be able to catch her breath.

She held her stomach. Am I breathing? It didn’t feel like air, exactly, but like the prickly stream of forced motion that came from a automatic hand-dryer in a public bathroom.

She had left her windows down in the car, but it didn’t help—inside, she felt her skin damp and burning. She rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioner.

She switched on the radio and listened to a song about a woman who finally decides to divorce a man who isn’t good to her. She woman sang that she was now free to go out at night and
free
to watch the sun rise.

Emily listened to the lyrics carefully, trying to think about anything but what she had just learned.

By the time she had left Colleen’s, she had somehow worked her way back into the woman’s good graces. She’d asked about Colleen’s children and grandchildren and her work at the textile factory (now closed) in Keno.

Come back sometime, Colleen had offered, placing her bird-like hand in Emily’s hand. Her kindness, as strange and sudden as her anger, confused Emily. Emily nodded and promised that she would.

In the song on the radio, the woman’s repetition of the word free became a shout, and the instruments in the background responded by rising in volume. A guitar shrieked as the drums pounded and the entire movement of sound became more insistent in agreeing with her voice. Yes, freedom.

Emily discovered that she was crying when she felt the tears slick the steering wheel.

•

Jonathan sat in her living room, on the carpet instead of the couch, where he never seemed quite comfortable or knew exactly how to sit. On the floor, he crossed his legs and sat upright. He shuffled his cards deftly in a few movements of his hand and set down the deck between them.

Okay, what would you like to ask?

Emily set her glass of wine on the carpet. She’d been nervous all afternoon after speaking to Colleen, but also at the thought of seeing Jonathan again. But he had not allowed her to be nervous. He had come to her and let her rest in the smell of his clothes, which didn’t smell of soap but of something clean like cedar and his skin underneath, slightly salty. She told him the story that Colleen had told him and he said exactly the right thing:

That’s fucked up, he said, and gave her a hug.

Emily looked at the back of the cards. The edges were rough and in some places the paper separated away in layers. He had used the same deck for years, he told her, though he had dozens of others which he used for himself.

What do you ask yourself?

He had shrugged. Anything. Anything I don’t understand and need help with.

Can I ask the cards about something that isn’t just about me? Emily asked. I mean, something bigger, something that I can’t control on my own, with just my own choices?

Jonathan looked down at the deck. You can ask what you need to know about the situation. He looked up and gave her the lopsided, nervous smile he gave her (and maybe everyone? She didn’t know him well enough to know yet) when he was about to say something he wasn’t sure about.

Is it about the town? He asked. Your family? The whole thing? Because I can only tell you things directly about you and your choices. I can’t explain somebody else’s behavior.

Emily nodded. She pursed her lips together. I want to know what needs to happen to make the murders stop, she said. I want to know if I have something to do with it. If I can help.

Why? He asked. How could you stop it?

She shrugged. I’m from here, she said. This is the only place I can call home. My mother left because something terrible happened and she never had a home again. If I’m going to stay here, I want to help make it right.

He nodded and picked the cards up again, shuffling. He stopped and cut the deck.

Okay, he said. Here’s what the cards have to say.

1

The Harris twins had just arrived home from school when Frank saw them. The boy still wore his backpack. The girl’s was on the ground, bright pink and plastic reflecting in the sun. It was the hottest time of the day, just before dusk and after an entire day of sun overhead. He wondered how children could play in this heat, how they didn’t just fall over with exhuastion.

They were taking turns on the tire swing. They were about eight or nine, maybe ten. They still played like children, though from the car, where he had parked with his window down, he could hear the boy shout words like
stupid
and
die
. The boy, in between turns, was playing with a toy water gun, pointing it at his sister on the swing and at something beyond her.

Frank liked these two children. They had spark. He liked the children with spark most. He had the twin emotion of excitment, a palpable fluttering in his stomach, and sickness at his excitement, which also bloomed in his stomach as heartburn. He swallowed down bile and composed his face. He couldn’t appear suspicious to them. He had to be friendly, but not too friendly. He had to get them to come with him, otherwise, it would be messy, it would be partly ruined, like the time before, when the child had bit him in the shoulder when he was driving and he’d had to let the kid out after threatening that if he told, he’d come back and kill the boy’s whole family.

These ones were trusting. He stopped his car in front of their house and asked if their parents were home. He knew they weren’t, but just in case some other adult was lurking around, he had a plan. There was a dead cell phone in his pocket and a story about having to reach his wife, who was in the hospital up in Keno. It wasn’t much of a story, but he figured the details would flesh out if needed. He performed well under pressure.

When he asked them to get in the car and show him where the next gas station was, they both agreed, arguing about who knew how to get there better. Before they went to the store, though, Frank told them he needed to stop back at his house, he had to get something important. They agreed; it was an adventure, one they’d tell their parents about when they got home.

He knew the dilapidated trailer from his own childhood. His uncle, James, had lived there, and when he had died, the house had gone to James’ sister, Frank’s mother, who had stayed there off and on when she got tired of his father’s drinking. It was close to the lake, but far enough in the woods that it was hard to find if you didn’t already know how to get there; the woods around Echo Lake still had mystery, despite all of the houses that had sprung up around them. The old driveway to it had long been grown over, and the trees sloped over it, hiding it from view. But he knew the markers by heart.

It was the kind of place where even the loudest screaming would go unnoticed.

He kept them for as long as he could stand it. They became sluggish. They were dirty and started to smell. The way they flinched when he came in didn’t thrill him; it simply reminded him that yet again, he’d gotten himself into a predicament that could only end in getting rid of them. And that was the hard part.

He hated doing it every time. The joy was in getting and keeping, not in disposal. But he was starting to worry, and they were so tired, so unhappy. Nothing like the children he’d met that day after school. He brought a wheelbarrow, bound their hands and feet, and covered their eyes. They cried, weakly, but he was not worried: there was nobody around for miles.

He could not stand to hit them or hurt them in a violent way: he held the children’s heads under the water until they stopped moving. He bound them both together, weighted them with a cement brick, and rowed them out in the canoe he kept tied up to a tree by the shore.

He looked out across the lake, which shone dully in the heat. He was drenched in sweat, sick to his stomach, and wanted nothing more than to get rid of them.

He had never done this before, had never left them in the lake. He had usually taken them home, back to Arkansas, where the nearby Ozark mountains were deserted enough to hide most anything. But he didn’t want to drive all that way with them; what if he got pulled over? What if he panicked and revealed he was hiding something and they made him open up the trunk? He’d only done this twice before, and each time, the drive back had been hellish. It was safer just to be done with them here.

He had to row a while before the lake was deep enough to drop them in. He was far from houses, far from other shores, and it was early in the morning—the sun was just slipping up and the sky gray. He threw the block in first, and when it hung heavy, he slipped the bodies over the edge of the water. They dissappeared, bubbles rushing up for a few moments until the water was still again.

His uncle had died here. He’d been found shot, floating in the water. Frank sometimes wondered if he had been killed for being something like Frank was: a monster, the kind of person who deserved to be shot in the head.

Frank waited a while, watching the sun come up. It didn’t seem fair that the children, who had done nothing, would not be able to see the sunrise. It didn’t seem fair that he was still here, alive, when they were gone, their parents knowing nothing of where they were, hoping they might come back home when they were, for certain now, past hope.

As though responding to his thoughts, he felt his boat rock; the water was rippling, sending him back to the shore. He saw the mist on the water more clearly now, the sun visible above the mountains. It was greenish and heavy, a sickly-looking dampness.

His mother had not let him swim in the water here and would shout when he waded out farther than his knees.

It’s not safe here, she said. It’s dirty. Sometimes it’s even poison. You heard about the mist?

He had not.

It rises up and makes you sick. Possesses you like. That’s the old story, and I don’t doubt it.

His boat rocked so vigorously that he started to row back, afraid it would send him crashing back to the shore. He shouldn’t be out here, visible to any passerby, anyway.

He rowed back, tied up the boat, and washed up the room where he’d kept the children.

Maybe, he thought, I’ll stop soon. Maybe I should burn down this place and make it harder for me to come back here. This was the place he always went when he felt the need coming on. It was part of the need. If he destroyed it, maybe the need would diminish.

But he wasn’t ready yet. He washed his hands in the sink and got in his car and drove back to Fort Smith, where his wife waited and asked him how his weekend had been and how many fish he had caught and thrown back.

2

Levi had not slept well since Frannie’s death.

He had not known her well, though in a small town it was impossible not to know everyone in passing. He had sold her candy bars during his senior year in high school when he had to sell a box of a hundred to raise money for the senior trip to Dallas. He remembered her in particular because she had bought half of the box. At that time, she’d been a well-preserved forty or so. She wore her hair long and straight, in the style of the time, and had traded her cat’s eye glasses for the large, colorful, plastic frames that everybody wore in the 70’s. He had known her then only as the last member of the Collins family and one of the few single women of her age. She had no children, which was rare, and he’d heard rumors about her his entire life. She was a lesbian. She was barren. She had multiple boyfriends up in the city, who she visited over the weekend. But you can’t believe everything people say about other people.

Frannie’s death kept him awake at night. He had nightmares about it. In the dreams, he saw her death in detail—the dark slice in her throat, the blood pouring down on her flowered nightdress, the sounds she made as she woke and clutched at her throat and how the blood came out in gushes with her heartbeat, first sluggish and then streaming when she tried to scream and couldn’t.